The woman who taught Mario Puzo the value of secrecy.

After a talent hunt conducted in February, Random House and the estate of Mario Puzo have asked a journeyman novelist and Florida college professor named Mark Winegardner to write a sequel to The Godfather, depicting the further adventures of America's favorite organized crime family, the Corleones. A commercially viable book may result, but the essence of the original's greatness will surely be missing because of an artistic advantage Puzo had that no other author can claim: Mrs. Puzo, his mother.

"I never met a real honest-to-god gangster," Puzo once said, explaining that he'd had to research organized crime in order to write The Godfather. But he didn't need to study or imagine the underlying attitudes and formative worldview of Don Vito Corleone.

"Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth," the author later wrote, "in my own mind I heard the voice of my mother. I heard her wisdom, her ruthlessness, and her unconquerable love for her family and for life itself, qualities not valued in women at the time. The Don's courage and loyalty came from her; his humanity came from her."

Puzo wrote these words in 1996 in a preface to a new edition of The Fortunate Pilgrim, his second novel, which was originally published in 1964, five years before the blockbuster that would make his name. Puzo himself (among many others) always considered it to be his best book. The novel told the story of Lucia Santa Angeluzzi, the heroic matriarch of a struggling Italian immigrant family living in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, on 10^th Avenue between 30^th and 31^st streets,during the Depression. (It was on this same block that Puzo grew up, just a bit downtown from the tenement where the young Vito Corleone character lived.)

The book received admiring reviews—the New York Times hailed it as "a classic"—but was a commercial flop and sent Puzo's career as a novelist into a potentially fatal stall: No publishing house would advance him even the smallest sum in anticipation of his next book. And money was of no small importance to the author, who was 45 years old with a wife and five children plus a hearty gambling habit, all of which he supported on what he could earn as a magazine writer, book reviewer, and novelist. He was also $20,000 in debt to relatives, banks, finance companies, and loan sharks.

As Puzo later told the tale, amid all the rejections, "One editor wistfully remarked that if Fortunate Pilgrim had only had a little more of that Mafia stuff in it"—a minor character was a mob chief—"maybe the book would have made money." Puzo took the bait and wrote an outline, which prompted G.P. Putnam's Sons to put up a $5,000 advance. Over the next three years (during which he continued to produce magazine stories and so on), he wrote his novel about a family of racketeers led by a patriarch who spoke in the voice of a particular little old lady.

Puzo finished writing in July of 1968 and used the final installment of his advance to take his wife and children to Europe. He returned home in debt once more, only to learn that bidding for paperback rights to The Godfather had reached $375,000 and was still climbing.

The winning offer, $410,000, was a record at the time. Puzo immediately called his mother to share the good news.

"Don't tell nobody," she said—you can almost hear Don Corleone's voice as he commands his son: "Santino, never let anyone outside the family know what you are thinking."

Puzo then called his sister and asked if she'd heard about his wonderful jackpot. "You got $40,000 for the book," she said. "Mama told me."